Firebirds
by shameless monkey
Summary: One morning, Ino doesn't come to training: Ino Ino Ino. Shikamaru's whole entire WORLD seems to be obsessed with that girl, and there's no reason for things to be that way. Or is there? Shikamaru-centric, with plenty of supporting characters. Please R
1. Chapter 1

**Firebirds**

**by Shameless Monkey**

**Chapter One **

This morning Ino didn't come to training. It meant that I didn't have to suffer through another one of her lectures on how, even though I was meant to be getting ready for the _jonin_ examinations, I hadn't stopped being such a lazy bones and so I was going to fail. It meant that there was no bang on my door when dawn rubbed sleepy fingers across the sky, and no smack upside the head while I waited for my coffee to brew in my kitchen, and for once, my only agenda was to get to the training grounds by ten am.

Training ground – somewhat obviously – ten. _At_ ten. Ino had insisted on that time 'Because,' she had said, 'It means you've got no excuse to be late. _Or_ lost.' And I guess it's okay, because it gives me a chance to sleep in when _s_he doesn't have training (so she won't be at my house early, raising hell) sometimes. But she was meant to be there today, and getting there, and only finding Choji waiting, it seemed pretty damned ironic that Miss Perfect wasn't there herself.

"Where's Ino?" Choji asked me, his cheeks rosy from that morning's private training. Just about every clan in the village has their own training grounds, own techniques and family secrets, and we've all three – along with everyone else from the Konoha Eleven, minus Lee, Tenten and Naruto – been brought up from the cradle basically with weapons in our hands, even as they run through our blood. The Akimichi's wake up at four, eat breakfast, and then train for the next three and a half hours in the field behind their house. I shrug and Choji scrunches up his nose.

"But… is she… _sick_ or something? I mean… she's… _Ino._"

"Look," I respond, trying not to let my impatience show too much (though it's useless to try anyway… this is _Choji_, and he gets me like no one else) "Maybe something's come up with the Yamanaka clan, yeah? Let's just get this over with." And because Choji gets it, he doesn't argue. Doesn't point out that if the Yamanaka's had something going on, then our parents would be a part of it too, and they aren't.

Six hours later and Choji heads home and I head up to Hokage Tower.

Sometimes I think that I should have just tried to win my chunin battle against Temari, from Suna. Because that way I could have avoided soooooo much trouble. Don't get me wrong, I like that certain events – trying to bring Sasuke back, avenging Asuma – brought those of us who were involved closer together, but sometimes I think that there's some admin god up in heaven who hates me for being disorganised and forces me into jobs like this on purpose.

So when I'm sat down in front of Tsunade-sama, and vaguely recalling my first visit to her office, four years ago, kind of ignoring her on principle, as a means to avoid the whole… responsibility kick, I miss what she says over her steepled fingers, the first time around.

"What was that, sorry?" I ask and she raises a delicate eyebrow, but instead of staring me down sardonically as per usual, she looks carefully calm, deceptively collected, and alarm bells go off in my head.

"Yamanaka Ino." She says, and the alarm bells abruptly fall silent. "Tell me about her."

So much for something important. I feel myself kind of re-slouch in my chair and I shrug. "Nothing much to tell," I drawl, enjoying the tiniest quiver of irritation at the corner of the most powerful shinobi in the village's mouth. "She's blonde, she's thin, she's a decent shinobi… stronger long range than short, as with most kunoichi…" the faintest lines in Tsunade-sama's forehead appear and I curb the sexism. "…of her…build, and… predisposition. From the Yamanaka clan."

_Likes flowers_ I nearly add, but stop myself. It's unneccessary. Whatever's going on, I've put my neck out quite far enough. It's not that I don't want Ino to be in the Hokage's good books, so much as I'd rather _she_ put herself there than me commend her efforts and pave her way. Tsunade watches me for a second longer, and it creeps me out a tiny bit, but I stick it out, stay slouching in her chair and eventually she nods.

"Thank you Shikamaru-kun. That will be all."

For a second I worry whether or not I've screwed things up for Ino by being so blasé about her, but probably not. Tsunade-sama knows what I'm like, and if she wants to talk to Ino, Ino's best bet is for Tsunade-sama to approach her in person, which is when Ino can really pull out her big guns, spring The Ino Effect on the Hokage.

You have to see it to believe. She puts a smile on her face and basically dances instead of existing, and people are completely dazzled by her. It's what made her first in the village in Kunoichi classes, what makes her such a good decoy now. Since the time in the forest when she tried so unsuccessfully to woo Neji, she's learnt a lot, and sometimes when we're walking down the street she just… walks in a particular way, and you can see people's – men's _and_ women's – eyes following her silver-blonde head and slender figure. Unless you're me, and know better.

Oh, I know she doesn't do it for any sneaky mean sort of reason, she just likes being the centre of attention. If Obaa-chan (not that I'd call the Hokage that to her face) wants to take her on as a _proper_ apprentice, in the way that Sakura is, Ino will only stand to gain from the lesson in humility. Not that the Hokage is particularly humble, but it's all about the _way _she shows her pride, I guess. And it will benefit us all, in the long-run, too. I suppose.

Even though it's been years now since Asuma died, we kinda haven't been as strong of a team as everyone wanted (including our own parents) since then, and if Ino becomes Tsunade-sama or Shizune-san's apprentice, well then, more power to her. Sakura stopped being such a twit (mostly) when she was taken under the Sannin's sleeve, and Ino will probably thrive under such guidance, too, having _real_ powerful women to look up to. Instead of… oh, movie stars and girls who don't eat and stuff, I guess. Asuma used to be able to keep her in check, but Ino left to her own devices can be _such _an airhead. I wouldn't put it past her to have skipped training altogether to have… gone to those hotsprings outside the village or something instead.

When I get home, my house seems… quieter than usual, and I realise it's because Ino isn't there. She usually tails me home, hangs out with my mum and helps around our house and doesn't leave for _hours_ in the afternoons, when she isn't working in her parent's shop, or squeezing in extra training sessions, or having girl-time with Sakura, but I guess if she wasn't at training, then maybe she's found someone else's house to invade. The dishes are stacked, cleanly on the bench, being drained of soap and water, and unusually I grab a tea towel and begin to put them away.

"So Ino isn't here today, huh?" I say, putting away the plates before moving onto the cups.

"She's just a bit tired." My mother replies and I roll my eyes when she isn't looking. _I'm_ tired, but you don't see _me_ being allowed to take a break. I don't say so though. Later, I climb up onto the roof to watch the night-time clouds, whirling grey and black across the blacker starry sky, and when I'm chilled to the bone I climb back down into my room, falling asleep quickly and deeply, the offness of the day finally gone with the rising of the moon.

But when I wake up the next day, she isn't there again.

**End Chapter.**

OMG I'M NERVOUS! D: FIRST FANFICTION! I'M NOT SHOUTING, I'M JUST STUCK IN CAPSLOCK! INSPIRED BY SAVING FRANCESCA BY MELINA MARCHETTA :)

PLEASE R&R! HELP A FIRST TIMER OUT :S WAS THAT OKAY? WOULD YOU READ IT IF I KEPT GOING? :S

**DISCLAIMER: I DON'T OWN IT. WHICH MAKES ME FEEL ALL… GRIZZLE-GUTSY :(  
JK ;) ABOUT THE GRIZZLING, I MEAN, NOT THE OWNING.**


	2. Chapter 2

**Firebirds**

**by Shameless Monkey**

**Chapter 2**

I've left my curtains open again. In the morning, when the sunshine comes streaming in on me in uncomfortably warm panes of light it's the first thing I register, and I wonder, if on the offchance Ino ever tried to wake me up like this, I'd be any quicker at getting up. Probably not. Sunshine, buckets of icy cold water, ear splitting whistles delivered directly into my ears, having my blankets stolen… it's all one and the same, really. And even though everyone thinks I'm lazy, sometimes it's stubbornness more than anything else. Not tenacity like Ino or steadfastness like Choji. Just a general "fuck you" to the powers that be, mostly manifested in that crazy blonde herself.

I don't really know why I fight, but whenever Ino tells me what I am (rather, what she _says_ I am) we enter a battle of wills. She thinks she knows me better than anyone else, and sometimes I think about maybe giving her a dressing down and explaining, once and for all, how much of a ridiculous statement that is, but usually I just try to undermine everything she says I am instead. Or shrug and close my eyes.

It's what I usually do when she talks at me, too. Even when I'm longing to answer. When she isn't being stupid and overbearing, she is sometimes actually _interesting_, and it _kills_ me that she manages to hook my attention like that. And whatever little tantrum she's throwing at the moment, (because it's occurring to me that she's doing this to somehow get at me... maybe show me up by exaggerating my behaviour?) to try and make me step up and be a bigger person or whatever, I'm not going to let her win.

But my curiosity gets the better of me, and I go down stairs, to where Mum is cooking breakfast, and, unusually, Dad's there too. He's retired now (if one of the ninja who'll be called up for duty again in a flash if there's ever another civil emergency) and the idea that people get up when the sun is only just rising always strikes me as one of the greatest mysteries in a very mysterious universe.

I grab an apple and polish it against my vest before taking a bite, sliding down opposite my dad. He reads the newspaper while mum clatters away and the savoury smell of eggs and spring onions drifts over to the table.

"Is there something going on at the Ino's?"

At home, when we're alone, their house isn't "the Yamanaka's", but "the Ino's". Familiarity breeds a hell of a lot of contempt though, and in my mind it's always "the flower shop", because I've been so ticked off with that girl so often that I've wanted to distance myself from her as much as I can, short of getting a beating for being disrespectful (which, caught between my mother and Ino herself, isn't very far at all). But now… I kind of need the familiarity, because this is getting kind of weird.

Dad stretches, tilting his head back to look at me, and his scars cast gentle dappled shadowy patterns over his face. I remember that when we were little, Choji and Ino and I would run our fingers over them gently, and even though he was (although we didn't know it) one of the most lethal jonin in the village, Dad would succumb to the examination with closed eyes, crouching down to better allow us access to his face. Ino used to call them waves.

And even though I've seen people kind of look at him and avert their eyes, embarrassed, I love the way he looks. There's a solace for me in those lines, a security in the scar tissue. He's fought for us, and won. So when he says,

"It's under control, Shika-kun," I take a heady dose of relief from his words.

But when I just see Choji at our training ground with his eyes filled with worry, it takes all I have not to rush home and demand to know if he was lying to me.

"Shikamaru, there's something going on with Ino." He says, coming up to me, crossing his arms.

Choji is the best friend anyone would wish to have. Strong and supportive and filled with an easy sort of… grace of presence. He's stalwart and loyal and I listen to what he says as readily as he obeys my command in the field. But if there's one thing I don't get about him, it's that he and Ino are crazy about each other. I sometimes want to ask where he's put the years she spent ignoring us at the academy, pretending she didn't know who we were, but even though I've even brought it up with him once, all he would say was "She was just going through a phase." So, because he seems to have a better grasp of her than I do, hearing him say that kind of ticks me off. Caught between my father and my best friend, I don't know who to believe.

"My dad says she's fine," I snap, which is almost true, and I lace kunai through my fingers, settling into my stance and Choji realises that the subject is closed as he, too, readies himself for my attack, when –

"Oi, Shikamaru!" comes a shout, and out from between the trees, Team eight come into sight. Since Asuma-sensei died, I've gotten to know Kurenai well, and, I've known Shino and Kiba and Hinata for most of my life. I straighten up as they come up to us, and Kiba gestures to the two of us.

"Where's Ino?" he asks, and Choji glances at me.

"She's got the fl – " I begin to lie, but Kiba only means it as a token question because he interrupts me with a:

"You guys totally forgot, didn't you?"

"About what?" Choji asks, and Kurenai raises her eyebrows ever so slightly.

"The Suna-Konoha negotiations." She says. "The delegation arrive today."

Fuck. I _had_ forgotten. I sigh though, instead of saying so, and kind of close my eyes.

"Aren't they meant to be arriving this afternoon?" I ask. "Or… freshening up after their journey?"

"Temari of the Sand wants to begin the discussions immediately," says Shino, from beneath his jacket. "Suna are in a bit of financial trouble, and she's… not the most patient of customers."

True that. When I faced her in the chunin exams she walked into what I was doing blindly. She had been in control when she faced Tenten, but she lost that with me. Because she thought she was winning. Don't get me wrong, she's a clever girl, and sure, she totally saved my butt from being killed by Tayuya, but it's a connection we never acknowledge… I think I might have stung her pride in the exams.

Suna being in trouble is news to me, though. Their desperation is sort of showing through in that they've sent their second-in-command to negotiate on our land, on our terms, but I doubt that they'll leave empty-handed, because, for one thing, Naruto, who is like Obaa-chan's surrogate son, actually _likes_ Gaara, despite that weird time when Lee was sick and we went to visit him, which will influence whatever agreement is eventually brokered between our two villages, and for another, for all that Temari of the Sand specialises in manipulating the wind (which is perhaps why she gets on so well with Naruto herself) she is as indomitable as stone. For a second I reflect on why I – and everyone else – finds it virtually impossible to drop the epithet from her name, but then I realise that everyone is looking at me, that I need to do something, or say something, or… move.

So I do. Shrugging my hands into my pockets I begin to walk up to Hokage tower with Kiba and Choji on either side of me, and Shino and Hinata and Kurenai bringing up the rear.

**END CHAPTER**

A/N: I'm sorry this is kinda filler-chapter-y. And sorry for not updating as soon as I'd hoped to – I hate having to wait ages for authors to update, but like, honest-to-god, my computer stopped working properly. I can't get into my fanfiction account and my email on the same server anymore, and so I had to suss that out in order to upload. Like, I had to upload onto sendspace, send it to myself, and then open it on another computer, and upload onto fanfiction from there.

But on the bright side, Temari's coming into the picture now, too :D And others. What do you reckon? Review and tell me how it is, please. I've never written anything else in my life like this, and feedback is so good to get, so I know what it's like for you, the reader, to experience?  
Oh and sorry for swearing :s It's just how I imagined him thinking it =/

The next chapter will be better, I promise!

**DISCLAIMER: Shameless Monkey is shameless. She would probably try to steal the rights before she bought them, and as she has misplaced her balaclava at present, neither sitch is taking place.**


	3. Chapter 3

**Firebirds**

**by Shameless Monkey**

**Chapter 3**

Thanks to a dose of reluctance-induced dawdling, by the time we make it up to Hokage Tower we're among the crowd of last-minute stragglers filing into the packed room. It's one of the formal audience chambers in the Hokage Tower and this is evident in the fact that Obaa-chan sits facing the hall crowded with jonin and chunin in the red and white robes of office, with only the faintest trace of her distaste for the garments showing in her face.

I have to admit she does look kind of odd wearing them, or at least… it's hard to imagine that this serene woman in the flowing rose and lily colours, sitting in the carved lacquered chair is actually one of my dad's drinking buddies, when she doesn't have to endure this pomp-and-ceremony side of her job. That in itself – to my way of thinking, at least – makes her perfect for it though. She isn't in this for the power, but to keep us as sound as she can.

Next to her like heirs apparent, stand Sakura and Naruto, the former looking every bit the competent medic, and the latter looking like… well, like Naruto, while, on her right hand side stand Temari and the Sand shinobi who have come with her, all this way.

She stands, with perfect posture, one hand clasped loosely around a glass of water, and looking at her it's hard to guess that she just made a four-day journey in two. Dressed in a leaf green yukata embroidered with pale yellow chrysanthemums, she looks more distant and formal and important than I can ever remember seeing her.

She still has that slightly arrogant look about her though, what would on a less pretty face perhaps be called a sneer, and I can tell that the whole rowdy Konoha ninja settling down thing doesn't impress her one bit. Between her and her brother, the Suna shinobi are pretty meek in situations like this, I'd bet. And you can't really blame them.

Mostly I ignore what Obaa-chan says when she begins her welcome speech, and mostly this is completely involuntary on my part. Kiba keeps up a running commentary under his breath about which kunoichi present he'd _do_ and explaining – for my benefit, I think – why Tsunade-sama and Temari-san don't fit into that category. The Sand kunoichi herself has taken over from Tsunade now, and I can see Hinata and Tenten – and even Sakura, up the front – listening to her with their eyes. I think they all idolise her a bit. Someone once said she fought like a warrior angel, but seeing as I've never seen an angel fight, I can't say I'm in a position to comment on that.

When we came in we'd been given pamphlets on the schedule for the next few days – though, small-fry chunin as we are, it kind of doesn't affect us at all anyway – and Kiba has begun to pleat his into a fan as Temari continues to speak, while he continues to explain - in graphic detail, the shortcomings of Tsunade and Temari as bedmates.

"I mean, good _god_, they love the sound of their own voices." He mutters under his breath.

_And you don't?_

The room has gone still, and everyone is looking at us and I feel my cheeks redden slightly. Kiba is a lot like Ino in some respects. Impotently loud and horribly conspicuous, and that's totally rubbed off on me now by association.

"Is there something wrong?" says Temari in a politely icy voice, and I realise she's looking straight at _me,_ not Kiba at all. The latter, writing something furiously on his pamphlet hands it over to me.

_Ask her where she got the pinecone she's sat on so self-righteously. _I glare at him but he looks past me to Temari.

"We were just wondering…" he begins and I can't believe he's going to make this worse so I interject, looking desperately for something else to talk about, and latch onto the colour of her dress.

" – if your dress was dyed with Indigo... Wind is, uh, famous for its dyes, after all…" I finish lamely.

She raises one delicate eyebrow and stares me down like I'm a speck of insignificant dirt, as she says "Actually it's from Tea Country. Sunagakure no Sato has ties there with the silk merchants." She pulls an invisible string from her sleeve and then looks up again. "And Indigo is _blue_. This is made with _Lo Kao_… because it's _green_."

I hear someone snicker and I can tell from the look in Temari's eyes that she can too, as if she's won this exchange, and if I cared more perhaps I'd be ticked off by the fact that she's addressing me like I'm five years old, but as it is I'm not that interested in any of this so I just stare at her until she turns away again.

But when it's finally over and we're leaving Tsunade calls me back.

It's like being back at the academy as she unfolds her arms and holds out her hand for Kiba's fan-come-pamphlet, and I don't want to give it over to her, ever. Besides the pine cone comment he's scribbled a thousand random notes and random musings on the thing, and god only knows what goes on in Kiba's brain, especially considering what he's been talking about the past hour... I hand it over though, having no choice but to do so, and after a second she raises her eyebrows.

"I think you'd better come with me, Shikamaru," she says.

When we're sat down in her office – rather, I'm sitting, in the chair which has pretty much become my second home, and she's trading her robes for her normal green jacket – she hands me back the piece of paper.

"I like this." She says, with a gleam in her eyes. "It's good to see chunin taking initiative like this."

_The hell? _I look at the piece of paper, actually _read_ what Kiba's written down and my mouth wants to drop.

He'd been listening, the whole entire time, and there are comments and diagrams and calculations about the economic effects of the deals proposed and their social impacts (indicated with happy and sad smiley faces) all over the margins of the hand-out. It isn't that I hadn't expected something this smart from Kiba so much as that it's so _shrewd_ of him to have done this. I look back at the golden-eyed woman opposite me, and see that familiar gleam in her eye. It's the patented Yamanaka Ino/Tsunade-sama I-can-profit-from-your-impending-inconvenience look, and seeing it I know I have to act quickly. "I'll set you up to work through these with the Suna delegates," she shoots in first though, so when I say

"I'll go get Kiba instead, shall I?" It comes out sounding more like an attempt to wriggle out of this than I meant for it to, and she knows it too.

"According to this, Kiba's thoughts about the Sand shinobi are… less than diplomatic," Tsunade says politely. She rolls up the pamphlet and hands it back to me. "Shikamaru, don't be coy. You've worked with Temari – " _fought her, you mean,_ I think but do not say. " – more than most of the shinobi in this village. Added to that, you outrank Kiba and have a cooler head than he does when it comes to dealing with such delicate affairs. All in all, your skills are better placed in this way than his own."

And then I get that this is blue sky speak. She's begun to start down that boring thread of how much potential I have, which means that she'll give up on me in this, and so I nod, relieved, standing to go.

But when I stand and turn to leave, I run slap-bang into the Sand Kunoichi herself. We're the same height, (which is interesting because I'm usually taller than girls) and so I can't not look at her, but disliking the whole eye-contact gig I find a tiny scar that splits her eyebrow to focus on instead.

Unfortunately, this means that when she steps to the right as I step left, we end up doing that awkward dance to get around each other, and when I'm in the doorway and she's standing half in and half out of Obaa-chan's office, that old witch herself smiles at Temari.

"Meet the Konoha nin in charge of negotiations." Tsunade tells her, "He is one of our more promising strategists, and will undoubtedly be invaluable to the proceedings."

Temari turns to me. Unwillingly, I meet her dark, blue-green eyes. They're an odd colour, in my opinion. Strangely flat, as if she's got little panes of glass in there instead of irises, that serve to hide all her thoughts and feelings. If she has any at all. Besides pms, I mean.

"Temari-san," I say, finding it beyond me to attach the more appropriate "-sama" honorific. She gives a curt nod, then says,

"What's your name?"

"Shika-k – Shikamaru…" _I beat you in the chunin exams and you rescued me from Tayuya and you damn well know it._

"Well, Shika Shikamaru, if we're to be working together, let me give you a piece of advice." It's kind of hypothetical, because I know she's going to lecture me anyway, but all the same I nod. "Regardless of the current friendship between our two villages – with all due respect, my lady," she adds, and I realise when Tsunade tilts her head regally that the Sand girl isn't just talking in the third person, about herself. "Sunagakure always holds our own interests above the agendas of others. A poet who once passed through our land many years ago from the Tea Country said _Prophesy to the wind and only the wind will listen._" I see Tsunade's amber eyes flicker, and I wait to see if she'll say anything about the poet in question – her ancestor, the first Hokage. She doesn't though. While know her colours she might, Temari of the Sand doesn't know the first thing about Elemental Countries literature. "You would do best not to forget that."

"Thanks for that," I say. "I'll – " but she turns her back on me in dismissal, as if I don't exist at all, going to sit in the seat I'd recently vacated on one side of Obaa-chan's wide mahogany desk.

"Senju Hashirama." Her head snaps around.

"What?"

_Don't, _I try to tell myself.

"The Shodai Hokage. _He's_ the travelling poet you mean. And it's _Prophesy to the wind, to the wind only, for only the wind will listen._ From the _Leaf_ village. Not from a country famous for Tea _Leaves_." I speak slowly and clearly, and her strange eyes – not like glass, I've decided, but Nephrite – narrow.

She doesn't like to be wrong. Bad move, but I'm well and truly over our little moment, and when I turn to Tsunade again (I can practically hear the cogs turning in her brain as she supresses a smile that quivers at the corner of her mouth) I bow slightly, say "Thank you for your time, Godaime Hokage," politely, and then leave through the open door.

**End Chapter**

**Disclaimer: When the leaves fall upwards to the sky, then shall I own Naruto. **

Wow! This one's heaps longer than I thought it'd be. Umm… yeah. Yay TemarixShika at odds-ness. If you've read it this far and that wasn't the sort of scene you were expecting then… all I can say is that I want them to _grow,_ not just suddenly be like "WHOA MY GAWD IM IN LUV WIF UUUUUU!!!!! XDXDXDXD!!!!"

Oh, and uh, the first hokage didn't write Ash Wednesday. Nor did I, or Kishimoto. T.S Eliot is a groovy dude and you should fully look up his work sometime. It's probably gonna come up in this now and again.

Please review! I mean, it's longer and everything… and I think I have a few issues with the way I've worded things, and your input would be great to help me make this watertight. If you'd be so kind...


	4. Chapter 4

**Firebirds**

**Shameless Monkey**

**Chapter 4**

That night we – mum and dad and me – go over to the Inos' for dinner. It's a long-standing tradition of ours, to go and eat with Inoichi and his daughter, and Chouza and Chouji and Choyo – Chouji's mum – at least once a week. We take turns hosting the get-togethers, and the amount of thought that goes into them is like something out of the Joy-Luck Club.

Tonight Inoichi has made Oden, and even though it's one of Ino's favourites – when she's not being stupid and saying she's dieting, anyway – she isn't at the table.

"Shall I take some up to Ino-chan?" I ask him, but before he can answer, my mum interjects.

"She ate earlier today." The fact that she's been over isn't surprising, but the fact that she almost expected the question makes a sluggish sense of suspicion kick in.

"That would have been lunch."

"Shika-kun, eat your food and be quiet!"

Dad and I exchange glances, and in his eyes I read _just do what she says_ and I wonder, not for the first time, why the _hell_ he married mum at all. The Akimichis, eating, don't pay attention to the outburst, but mum, stewing in furious silence, glares at me until I take a bite of fishcake. And taste garlic.

_My mum's_ secret ingredient.

And I realise that this goes beyond a dinner party, beyond my mother clucking over Ino, beyond my dad and Inoichi going along with whatever she says. I want to ask why my mum cooked dinner tonight, and why Inoichi is so quiet, and why Ino hasn't been training for days, but instead I swallow the lump of fishcake so that it sits in my stomach like some kind of poison.

And I don't say a word.

After dinner, I go up to Ino's room, and stand on the threshold of her space. The curtains are drawn even though it's still light outside, and there's something so unhealthy about her space that I hesitate about going in. But then she rolls over, and her eyes open and she looks at me for a splintered second, her listless blue orbs plunging some hook in me so that, almost against my will, I find myself walking over and sitting on the edge of her bed. She tries to sit up when I come in, but I shake my head and tell her not to bother.

"How've you been, Shika-kun?" she says, in a voice so soft and unrecognisable – as if my presence is exhausting her – that I take a second to decipher what she said at all. For some reason, it makes a flare of irritation rise in me. _I_ didn't want to have to intrude on her sacrosanct bloody bedroom. _She's_ the one who didn't come downstairs for dinner like any normal person would have, and it's so annoying that she's gotten away with it, too.

How many times have I tried to get out of these stupid InoShikaCho dinners? How many times have I been successful? But the rules have been bent for _her_.

"Fine," I say, and my tone is sharper than usual, and she shifts under the blankets so that her shoulders are no longer exposed to the cool, faintly stale air of her bedroom, and says

"You're mad at me."

I can't work out whether it's a statement or a question, but the fact that she has enough energy to pull an ambiguous move like that on me makes me even more annoyed, and when I snap "No, I'm _not_." I sound like the biggest liar in the history of the world.

"Okay," she says, caving, and for a minute I'm so shocked by this new turn in our conversation that her room returns to complete silence.

Ino is the queen of arguments, and even though I'm smarter, the fact that she's like a dog with a bone when it comes to nitpicking means that she usually reduces our spats to shouting matches, which Chouji tries to make less noticeable – when we're training and things – by building barriers of pure chakra around us to try and absorb the noise. Asuma used to say that showing our enemies discord like that was a Bad Sign, and even though it was only ever about trivial things - not battles or strategies or tactics, and certainly not when we're actually facing down some foe - we used to split angrily and guiltily and not speak to each other for the rest of the day.

Then later on - at night, mostly - she'll come and get me and we'll talk for hours, and laugh about whatever it was that had seemed so goddamned important before, and I go to sleep with a smile on my face.

Now though, she's just given in, and the unnaturalness of it makes me want to recoil from her, before I banish the instinct as ludicrously stupid. She rolls over again, facing the wall and the curtained window, and her bare shoulder, when I pull the blanket up over her, is cold. She closes her eyes, and against her pale skin, the delicate blue veins make it look like her eyes are recovering from violet bruises. Or maybe indigo ones…

Unwillingly, my thoughts trail back to the Suna kunoichi and I find myself waiting for Ino to ask me what's going on, the way she always does, but she doesn't say anything, and I blurt it out into the discordant silence instead.

"Temari had a go at me today."

"Yeah?" a chink in the curtains makes a stream of golden evening light beam down on her, turning her hair to the colour of sunshine where it lands, and even though her voice is whisper soft and she looks… strange, in a way I can't explain, I hold onto her forced interest (I can hear the indifference in her voice) and say

"Yeah. So I kind of bumbed her out in front of Tsunade-sama."

"I knew I taught you well," she tries to joke, but the words are laced with so much fatigue that I'm relieved to hear my dad call up the stairs that we're leaving, soon after.

Later that night, when I'm lying on the roof, staring up at the drifting night time clouds, thinking about Ino and Temari and Tsunade-sama and my mother, or 'the four most troublesome women on the face of the earth' (but mostly about Ino) it comes to me, what had been so wrong about the light and her closed eyes and the sun shafting down on her through the gloomy dusty curtains.

Once, when we were on a mission, we stopped at a temple, where a priestess in ages past had allegedly turned herself to stone, to save her village from a demon. There was a statue there, of her dying, turning to stone – whakakohatu haere, in the language of the people of that land – and tonight, in the room I don't think she'd left for days, Ino had looked like that priestess.

But Ino _isn't_ injured, and no one will tell me what the hell is going on.

**End Chapter**

**Omg. Sorry for the lack of updating :( I have no good excuse. Well… I found out some nasty family stuff… and then I went on holiday to run away from said family stuff for a while… but still. **

**And something weird happened here, too. I thought I updated like, earlier this week but I just checked and it told me I only had 3 chapters up :/ So sorry for that as well.  
**

**Hope you're all having a good 2009 so far!!! I can't believe I'll be 16 in half a year… craaazy. And then I can have sex legally haha. **

**I resolved to not drink fizzy drink anymore, unless it's diet. Just to keep my sugar intake down ;)**

**Yeah. Story goes onwards, at least :D**

**Disclaimer: I'm sure if you google Naruto it won't tell you that it's owned by a 15 year old new zealander… let me know if I'm wrong though. I'd be thrilled haha. **

**R&R, pretty please? Tell me how it was? **

**Much love, **

**Shameless Monkey x0x0x**


End file.
